Girl in an Empty Cage

by Graham Wilson

  Chapter 6 – The Search

  Buck was awake an hour before first light. He quickly ate breakfast and got onto Flight Control. There still had been no reports of Vic or his helicopter, and Buck’s phone calls last night had yielded nothing.

  So a search had been organised at first light, based out of Kununurra and Katherine, as the weather in Darwin was currently too bad to fly out of there. The cyclone was hovering out to sea, about 150 kilometres north-west of Darwin, with its track still much the same though starting to bear more south. It had now intensified from a Category Three to a Category Four, with wind gusts at the centre rated at upwards of 200 kilometres per hour. Based on the current speed and trajectory they would have four to six hours of search time before the weather would force them to call it off.

  Buck offered to send the fixed wing and two helicopters based at the station and to start searching the area just north of Timber Creek while the Kununurra planes concentrated on the area between Western Australia and the mouth of the Victoria River and the Katherine planes concentrated on the rough and broken country on the east side of the Victoria River, and back north towards the Daly River, in case Vic had decided to divert to Katherine or Darwin for some reason.

  Since Vic’s take-off yesterday morning about nine o’clock, when he had confirmed his destination and flight track and signed off after take-off, there had been nothing heard and no sightings or other information to tell where he might have gone. So it was a huge area to search, over 500 kilometres east west and 300 north south. But they would all do their best and hope luck was on Vic’s side.

  By lunch time nothing had been found. They pushed on, each searching an ever widening sector, racing against the clock and the weather. By two o’clock that afternoon the weather deteriorated such that the flying had to be abandoned. The cyclone was now stationary about 100 kilometres out to sea north-west of the mouth of the Daly River. It was still intensifying and they knew that huge rains and winds were coming this way. Already light rain had started at Timber Creek and overnight Pine Creek had received over a hundred millimetres from a large storm cell on its southern edge. That meant that the Daly would be coming down and soon all the rivers coming from further south would be running a banker as well.

  Buck had not abandoned all hope; Vic had always struck him as a survivor, though he had thought the same about Mark. But it was a bad time for a machine to crash. The hopes of even looking, let alone finding anything, in the next three to four days, were extremely poor.

  During that first search afternoon, just after lunch, he got the VRD plane to fly him north to Timber Creek and out across the swollen rivers which burst out of the rough hills. He looked at the flooding water and the grey scudding clouds sweeping in from the north with a growing sense of hopelessness. If Vic was still alive he would not die of thirst. But now the chances of ever finding him or his helicopter were becoming vanishingly small. Buck told the pilot to turn around and they flew home where they battened down for the heavy rain and big wind coming their way.

  By that night it was raining steadily at VRD and over the next three days they got three hundred millimetres and Timber Creek got five hundred millimetres. Now every river west of Darwin was in flood. The cyclone, as expected, had come down over the Joseph Bonaparte Gulf and the residual low pressure system was now somewhere down over the southern Tanami Desert, west of Alice Springs and expected to bring rains over a wide belt of inland Australia.